1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of build to order manufacturing systems and more particularly to an intelligent system for determining an optimal partition size in a build to order environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
It is known for original equipment manufacture (OEM) system manufacturers to designate a portion of a system hard drive to provide a safe recovery partition where diagnostics, images, installers, etc can be stored for later use. The OEM system manufacturers effectively lock this portion of the system hard drive so that customers cannot easily delete the partition and cannot easily manipulate or corrupt the partition. One potential issue relating to this safe recovery partition is that the available storage of the hard drive is reduced by the size of the safe recovery partition. So for example, a customer who purchases an 80 GB drive might only have access to 74 GB via the drive that is referred to as the C drive. The remainder of the hard drive is not easily accessible. This issue can upset some customers who desire access to all of the available storage of the hard drive.
In a build to order environment, estimating the space needed on a per-system basis can be difficult because the contents of the recovery partition are determined dynamically at system build time. To minimize a possible negative customer experience, it is desirable to provide a method for allocating just enough space for the recovery partition needed for the data on that particular order.
It is known to manufacturer information handling systems using a build to order model. One advantage of a build to order model over traditional fill the channel business model is the ability to change a customer image and have image in the field almost immediately instead of having to wait up to two months for distributors to sell their inventory. Additionally, some build to order manufacturers can determine factory usage needs on a daily basis. Thus, if there are 5000 orders in a particular day, a cell within the factory can build 50 systems during a shift, there are 50 cells operating during a shift and there are two shifts active, it can be determined that to build the 5000 ordered systems 50 cells in shift 1 and 50 cells in shift 2 can fill the orders and thus the factory need to open for a third shift. It is also foreseeable that a build to order environment might maintain several terabytes of optional, locked, or trial software on a factory install server. Loading some or all of this software onto a customer system can induce additional sales for the manufacturer of the information handling system by providing the customer with examples of software of which they might otherwise not be aware.
It would be desirable that based upon factory build times allotted for a particular day, anywhere from none to all of the optional data is downloaded to a customer's system for that particular day.
Because some of this content is locked or optional, in some cases it would provide the best customer experience if this data were in a dedicated partition, be it Host Protected Area (HPA), hidden, or normal. There is a customer need to make sure that this partition is sized only as large as needed according to the optional/locked/trial data downloaded for that system.